


Death and Sleep are Lovers

by Wirrrn



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 21:14:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2124900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wirrrn/pseuds/Wirrrn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur navigates a strange and ever-shifting nightmare-scape in search of Eames, whilst in the rubble of the ruined dream, something stirs and hunts Arthur in turn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death and Sleep are Lovers

DEATH AND SLEEP ARE LOVERS  
by Wirrrn

  
"We must not look on Goblin-Men,  
We must not buy their fruits;  
Who knows upon what soil they fed  
Their hungry, thirsty roots?"  
(-Christina Rossetti)

 

"I am She who liveth and was dead  
Behold! I live on now forever more  
And hold the keys to Hell and Death"  
(-Mariano Baino's  DEAD WATERS (1994))

"The nurses and their soporific drugs came again. Eventually he lay back in the bed.  
To sleep. And, like so many others across the world, to dream of revenge."  
( DOCTOR WHO: SHADOWS OF WENG-CHIANG)

\-----

 

 

A great peal of thunder from above- as though the wet slate sky had just been snapped in half by an angry god- and the Dream is changing again, chewing on itself.

 

Windows slam shut and their glass fogs over with smoky cataracts. Piles of dusty junk in shadowed corners disgorge mould-dripping wooden boards and rust-encrusted nails that fly across the street and against lintels, doorways and frames, hammering themselves in place. Doors blast closed and the locking mechanisms are destroyed; handles melting like tallow, keyholes stopping up with lumpen ichors. Bricks rain from the sky and pile up neatly in the wet, hungry mouths of alleyways, sealing them away. Chains whip around handles and deadbolts and jerk angrily in his fingers when he tries to uncouple them, hissing rustily like steampunk serpents.

The Dream is attempting to deny him deeper access. Arthur knows he must be close.

The Point Man concentrates on the nearest boarded-up store front for a moment. The door bleats with the voice of a terrified child, holds itself shut as long as it can, but Arthur's willpower is a bright, fearsome thing and eventually the door sags open, defeated. The lion's head knocker spits and snarls at him 

( " **Nique ta mere, salop!")**

as he slips through, mentally cataloging and ignoring the store's contents

(Blackened fruit pregnant with insects; dry husks of vegetables reaching for his eyes with dead scarecrow fingers)

and out the back door into an unblocked street.

The smell of tungsten, rendered fat and machine oil which permeates the Dream is thick in Arthur's nostrils as he takes his bearings.  The ruined city is still freshly aflame, ash in the air and on his tongue. Projections lurk at the edges of his vision and skitter away when he moves to look at them. He can't quite make them out in the dim witch-light, but they scuttle out of sight with too many limbs, or too few, with joints and bodies aligned in the wrong order and shape. Eventually he just stops looking.

The night air is uncomfortably hot. It feels wrong on his skin. Night should be cool. Down an alleyway now, and he'd know he was going in the right direction even if the street-sign above the alley entrance wasn't rust-flaking iron that read

  
** L'Enfer est plus beau que le Ciel **

The smell of buildings and bodies slowly incinerating grows fainter the further Arthur makes his way down the narrow alley, picking his way past razor-sharp trash, mouldy detritus and the occasional flayed corpse. Every single corpse -stabbed, burned or worse- is wearing Arthur's own face. He tightens his jaw and keeps walking.

The alley opens out into a huge city square, dark, glistening wetly and strewn with disturbingly organic garbage.  An enormous fountain dominates the centre of the square. Several lichen-encrusted stone cherubim- all Phillipa and James, faces contorted in fury- squirt fouled water into the air through lichen-riddled trumpets. As he approaches, there is a roar, and a huge disembodied head- half the size of the square again and with flesh coloured a poisonous, radium green- emerges from the fountain.

The face is Yusef's. Only Yusef has never looked at Arthur with such malevolence.

" _ **I AM OZ, THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE!!**_ "howls Yusef's head.

Arthur shakes his own head. "It's the Fischer Job all over again. You should have gone before we started."

The giant green head stops its gibbering and looks at Arthur, puzzled. 

The Point Man sighs, impatient. "-You need to pee, Yusef."

Yusef's enormous face registers pained alarm, then breaks apart into clouds with an angry screech. The clouds vomit a bright blue downpour

//cobalt rain... cobaltrain... Cobol Train//

 on Arthur, but he simply tugs his collar up and moves forward to the lip of the fountain. There is no water within, merely a huge and sour- smelling hole that gapes from the stone, like a maw.

  
Arthur climbs over the iron railing, brushes long slathers of malachite rainwater from the sleeves and shoulders of his suit 

(Savile Row, Jon Green- $9,650)

and without further hesitation, steps forward into darkness. In a sudden bubble of still silence

(save for the whistle of a distant locomotive)

 the chasm swallows him whole.

-  -  -  

_"...Chéri..."_

               "...Chéri"                         ". _...Chéri..."_

"...Chéri!..."

 

-Arthur stirs from the deepest depths of the black void. He is floating, but he is not underwater.  His feet find purchase and he presses his leg muscles down hard, brushing his feet against the bottom, feeling detritus through his loafers

(fleshy detritus; soft, clingy and yielding)

and kicks off, ascending into nothing. There is no light, nor anything to illuminate. All is Void. 

Arthur still feels oddly as though he is swimming, though he is not wet. He continues walk-stroking upwards through the not-water and after an eternity of minutes, sees a light slightly above and to one side of him. He moves towards it, telling himself he did not just see something larger than a passenger train pass between him and the light-source, turning a hundred lidless cobalt eyes his way. Closer now and he sees strings of baleful luminescence- thousands of ancient Christmas lights, hung up and forgotten, clotted together into a neon hedgerow. In their centre, a patch of softer light describes what may be a door. 

A skittering noise behind him, and the sound of something stifling a giggle behind its hands, trying to be quiet. He feels an exploratory tug on his thigh; not grabbing or scratching, just curious, as if wondering what he is, if he is edible. The hand that is stroking him has far too many fingers.

The Christmas lights stutter, flicker and begin to fade.

 He kicks the grip off and throws himself forward, tumbling into the light

(he endemically does not hear multiple roars of cheated rage in the blackness behind him)

 

...Arthur gets to his feet. As he expected, there is neither flaming ruin nor bombed-out husk around him. He is in a beautiful, elegantly decorated restaurant, which he would have placed in Paris even without the view of the Eiffel tower through the enormous picture window dominating one entire wall.

A waiter in immaculate white tie appears and holds a chair out for him at a table for one, nearest the window, discretely removing a small placard on the tablecloth

( Réservé pour: M. Darling) 

Arthur sits. The waiter lights the table's single candle with a taper he retrieves from his sock, just above the metal chain that locks around his ankle and trails behind him for twenty or so feet before disappearing under a pair of swinging doors into the kitchen. Once the candle is lit, he extinguishes the taper by inserting it with a hiss into one of the wet, empty holes where his eyes should be. The bit of face left on the bone of his skull is recognizable as Nash.

Nash finds a menu in one of his pockets, and pushes it towards Arthur along the table with the stumps of his fingers. His chains clank as he sets up a pitcher of water and a glass. "Que désirez-vous, Monsieur Darling?"

Arthur takes a sip of the water, but doesn't even look at the menu, setting it down neatly in front of him on the table. "Un contrefacteur, sil-vous plait."

Nash looks up, empty eyes startled. Before he can respond, the chain around his ankle is yanked backwards, made taut, and he is dragged moaning back into the kitchen. The double doors swing open and closed four times, and there is silence.

Arthur takes another sip of his water, folds the menu

( which seems to actually be a timetable for the local train service)

 then stands and pats his lips dry with a dove-grey linen pocket square. He looks around the room and then addresses it, raising his voice to be heard in the kitchen; though he expects it to have already moved on from there by now. 

"I know you're listening. Just give him back and I'll leave. He's all I'm here for. I don't care about anything you're doing."

A burbling chuckle from behind him turns out to be a dozen live lobsters in their aquarium. They laugh at him merrily, pointing with their claws, even as the water they swim in begins to boil. The tank explodes, pieces of meat and exoskeleton flying in all directions.  Arthur dips his pocket square in what remains of his water and wipes a small gob of congealing lobster flesh from a lapel. A claw snaps at him as he drops it to the floor.

Another laugh, tinkling and musical and vastly amplified, and this time from all around him, every compass direction. The laugh resolves into a breathy purr:

_"Costume gentil, Artie"._

He turns, and now all the other tables in the restaurant are full. Every chair is occupied and every occupant is the same, down to the absurdly full cupid's bow of the sensual lips, the smiling eyes, the glimpse of tattooed skin at the arms and chest when he turns to regard Arthur, and the corduroy slacks and ugly burgundy jacket, which was the last thing Arthur remembered seeing him wearing.

There were at least a thousand, all looking at him with an identical look of smug curiosity and fondness. 

The voice again. Stentorian, but still melodic and playfully coquettish.

_"Vous pouvez poser une question a leur et une seule..."_

Arthur looks up at the ceiling. "...To narrow down which one is the real one, I suppose? And what happens if I guess wrong?"

Loaded, leering silence.

Arthur looks at the many simulacrums of the man he is here to find. He walks up and down the rows of  tables, occasionally stopping and peering closely at one of them. They preen convincingly under his administrations. Arthur's hands flutter in the air, wanting badly to touch. He tightens his jaw and places his hands in his pockets, even though it spoils the fall of his suit.

(Tiles have begun falling away from the wall, revealing rotten, cobalt-coloured mould spreading beneath. The chandelier in the ceiling has blown out, chips of dull blue glass tinkling to the floor beneath .The luxuriant carpet under his feet becomes more threadbare with each step he takes, rich crimson colour fading to sun-bleached salmon. Each table's floral centrepiece withers and dies, the flowers turning brown, the leaves blackening and falling to now dusty tablecloths, which themselves are boiling with feeding silverfish. Those tables set with food now reek, the food on the plates lost to sight beneath a writhing entourage of hundreds of maggots per plate. The huge window taking up one wall has darkened and cracked, and in the distance, something huge, multi-tentacled and dripping with the ichors of long forgotten oceans is scaling the Eiffel tower. A train sounds and applies its brakes, not far away.) 

Arthur pretends not to notice.

He turns and looks at the assembled men, his jaw tightening as he takes in  a thousand copies of that familiar face.

"If I was to tell you that I was in love with you" Arthur says "-that I've been in love with you for some time now, what would you say?"

Each of the men before him break into a broad, delighted grin. Arthur can actually watch it passing around the room from one to the other, like an electrical current or a Mexican wave.

"...Arthur!" They all speak at once, the mingled lilt of their voices like a bustling hive of honeybees. "...I love you too!"

Arthur feels a surge of triumph, even as something in his chest makes a sick lurch like a dying toad. A tight, cold smile haunts his lips. 

"Eames would never say that to me. You're none of you real."

-The floor drops out from under his feet.

-   -   -   

He falls through space, hundreds of Eameses falling with him. Despite himself, he tries to catch some of them, to help, but they burst into cobalt flame at his touch, blackening and curling in upon themselves like burning paper, before turning to ash. He continues to plummet.

Arthur closes his eyes.

He remembers Inception. Recalls being weightless in hotel rooms, hallways and elevator shafts. Thinks of the fluttering tug on the crisp lines of his cuffs and sleeves as his rate of descent was slowing. 

Opening his eyes now, and he is floating gently in the air like a bubble, perhaps a hundred feet from the floor beneath him, which becomes hard, gunmetal-grey marble and iron even as he observes it. He floats down slowly towards it for perhaps a minute, before becoming impatient and conjuring up a set of spiral stairs which he uses to descend the final twenty or so feet. He steps off the whorl of the staircase and looks back up at it with a sharp smile. A moment of concentration, a gesture in the air described with his fingers and a muttered word or two, and he is sending three looped Penrose Illusions climbing back up the stairs to meet anyone who tries to climb down to get him.

Arthur looks about himself. He has been here several times in the waking world, and recognizes the decor, stonework and lead-light. He is on the roof of the Notre Dame de Paris, surrounded on all sides by the famous carved gargoyles that line the  _Galerie des Chimères_.

The Bored-Looking Goblin nearest Arthur, propping up its pouting stone face with one clawed hand, turns to look and sigh dustily at him.

 

"~Actually, we're mostly Grotesques up 'ere, mate. Yer True Gargoyles 'ave guttering running through 'em, spouts in their mouths ter 'elp channel rain off of the roofs of buildings, that sorta thing. Most of us got no spouts- we're really just up 'ere for the spooky Gothic value."

Arthur rolls his eyes. He had of course, known that. He'd only used the term 'Gargoyle' out of habit. And anyway-

"Shouldn't you be speaking French?"

The Leonine Demon to the right takes the long strip of jasper carved to resemble rotting carrion away from its sharply chiseled fangs. "~Well, One supposes We could if you like, but We don't really see the point. It's not like One is compelled to. Besides, the stone that made Us came from a quarry in Milan." 

"I can speak Italian too"

"~We have no doubt of it."

On the corner beside it, the Marabou Stork statue- which does actually appear to have a drainpipe incorporated into its beak- makes a furtive attempt to steal the mineral meat whilst the Leonine Demon is occupied, but the larger creature catches it and, with a roar of displeasure and a swipe of its stone paw, sends the Marabou tumbling from the rooftop walkway to shatter, screaming, on the the road 230 feet below. 

The Bored-Looking Goblin huffs a laugh as it watches the stork smash. "~I'd 'urry on over to the Northern Facade if I was you, Mate. Things are comin' ter a bit of an 'ead, like. " 

The Leonine Demon nods its agreement. "~Yes; One would advice a certain degree of haste, Mr. Darling. And do try not to talk to any strange hunchbacks on the way. Vulgar little fellow."

Arthur nods and walks swiftly away down the parapet. The garg...grotesques freeze back into mineral silence within seconds of his gaze leaving them.

\- Only a few dozen hurried steps and the Dream is already warping; the hairs on the back of his arms crackle with ozone goose-flesh as something major pulls at the air. A few dozen more steps and the beautifully sculpted marble and wrought iron of the walkway is turning to rotting concrete and rusted tin, all of it looking like it was salvaged from a garbage dump quarantined by the CDC, all of it peeling and crumbling away into space. The guide rail beside him thickens, slips to the ground, becoming a set of train tracks. He veers away from them and quickens his pace

Arthur finds out what the Dream has switched when he rounds a final corner and sees the Notre Dame's High Altar spread before him- several rooms and two hundred odd feet out of place from where it should be.  Something in the dream- possibly incorrect information or memory seepage from someone within it- has also confused the High Altar of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Basilica of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal; it has the former's huge domed ceiling, gilded Gothic arches and stained glass partitions looming like huge Catherine wheels, but the latter's garishly baroque, Disney-Castle towers, alcoves of lead-light saints and a titanic crucified Christ at its centre.

Even as the heels of his loafers

(Blahnik, Fall Line- $14,500 a pair)  

ring on the marble tiles of the basilica's marbled floor, it warps like tallow before him. The gilded beams dull and green over with verdigris. The Stained Glass Saints in their alcoves morph into leering, bat-winged, lead-light demons with huge, pointed phalluses and the high-cheekbones and sky-clad eyes of Robert Fischer Junior. Christ on his cross is slowly writhing, his anguished face wet with real blood that pools beneath him, hissing as it drips onto the raised block of the altar itself. His face is Cobb's.

The altar on which Eames is spreadeagled. Naked and beautiful atop the shining white marble, he is Michelangelo's hottest wet dream made flesh. He seems to be unhurt, but is unconscious. Arthur has no doubt in his mind that this is the real Eames, not another forgery- principally because his friend is held to the altar at all four limbs by four stone grotesques- two with the bodies of panthers and single spikes protruding from their goblin heads, two horned and bearded demon overseers with cloven hooves and whipping, hissing serpents for tails.

The two Overseer Gargoyles turn as he approaches, and smiles at him with too many teeth. One of them chuckles, throatily.

"~ The Prodigal returns!" it leers. "Here to save your comely Anglian counterfeiter?" It lowers a clawed hand and caresses Eames' cock obscenely.

Arthur's jaw tightens and he moves towards the altar .

"~Not a single, determined stride further, Man of Points" says one of the Spike-headed Goblins.

"~And none of your cunning phantasms, either..." -this from its twin. "~The Dreamer has their clever fingers plucking the silken strands of this dream; any interference from you; the smallest alteration, the tiniest, most trifling of upheavals-"

"~ Or one of those Penrose Stairs you seem entirely too enamoured with~" adds the First Spike-head.

"~And the Dreamer will perceive it, and convey news of your transgression to us. At such a time as we are commanded in no uncertain terms to-"

"Has anyone ever told you that your speech is entirely too florid?" Arthur interrupts, hoping to goad a reaction, a mistake. "-and to what? Kill him, I suppose?"

The second of the Overseer demons throws back its stone head and shrieks with laughter. "~ Of course not! What would we gain by returning him to the World which Wakes?" It stops smiling and looks straight at Arthur, black lights glinting in the pitiless onyx orbs of its eyes. "...In that event, we are then fall upon your conniving paramour and to bear him, screaming, down to the foulest, darkest corner of Limbo's dread labyrinth. With us."

The Spike-heads intone in unison. "~To feed on him, slowly and without killing him. To sate our mineral flesh by battening on his own; to drive that quicksilver mind gibbering mad and those charmingly unaligned teeth wailing and gnashing in agony from his pretty skull."

The first Overseer grins at Arthur. "~Essentially, Artie, to fuck him up. Forever. Are we speaking plain enough to you now, boy?" 

The gargoyles all chuckle, fondling Eames' naked body again.

Arthur's face goes dead; becomes a disaffected, beatific mask. A tsunami of fury breaks over him, cold and dark. In the sudden preternatural calm of his crystalline rage, his voice is a sibilant warning, like the modified scales on the tail of a Rattlesnake.

"Touch him like that again and I will boil your brains in your skulls with a smile on my face."

The four gargoyles pause, look at each other warily. One of them drop its hands to its sides. A train whistle sounds, somewhere nearby.

Arthur moves forward a precious three steps. "You know who I am. There's no hiding from me. Not topside, and certainly not here. Hurt him again and you can run all you want, but I will track you down. And you will suffer. I won't even care about getting your fluids on these shoes."

The pair of Spike-heads back off several steps, in unison. The Overseers roar at them, shoving at their misshapen flesh with their talons, until, with obvious reluctance, the lesser gargoyles return to their posts. The Overseers let go of Eames' limbs, and converge on Arthur from either side, matching sneers on their carved faces.

"~ Do you think that we are afraid of you, Man of Points?" one of them snarls. 

Arthur uncouples the cuff-links at his wrists

(Yozu; Mammoth Ivory and pink diamond- $12,000 a pair)

and rolls up his sleeves. He places the cuff-links carefully in his pants pocket, and leaves his hands there .

 His smile is an Antarctic wind.

"You really should be."

-Arthur pulls his hands from his pockets. Raised in the air and his fingers, the backs of his hands, his palms and his wrists are all now covered with Hindu Mendhi, exquisitely inked henna skin decorations. Instead of the usual florals and nature motifs, however, the sepia-stained whorls on Arthur's hands describe quantum mechanics, differential equations, architectural blueprints, tesseracts and geometrical algorithms.

The gargoyles slow their progress towards him, blinking in confusion, unsure.

-Arthur claps his hands together, hard.

The first of the Overseer Gargoyles shrieks, vomits up its stone viscera out onto the floor, then explodes, shattering to marbled powder as the Gravitational pressure  immediately around it increases to 16,000 pounds psi- a thousand times normal atmospheric levels.

The second Overseer roars its fury through the settling dust of its companion and charges. Arthur whirls, and sweeps both hands forward in a "stop" gesture. The gargoyle slams to a halt as though it had run into a wall.  Arthur smiles again, the same sociopathic baring-of-teeth as before, then flings both hands upwards, high over his head.

The Overseer's roar becomes a panicked shriek as it is hurled violently aloft. It shoots into the distant sky like a baroque rocket,  cries of terror dwindling to nothing as it becomes a mere pinprick amongst all that infinite blue. 

Arthur turns towards the Spike-headed goblins, which are now actively backing away, looks of real fear overlaying the mock-horror already carved into their faces. 

He cracks his knuckles. The nearest Spike-head wails as huge fissures open up all along its body and it falls into broken, bleeding rubble at his feet. 

Rounding now on the the last remaining gargoyle. It bows at him, muttering a litany of fawning platitudes. Once, he might have listened to it. He flicks his hands towards the remains of the broken Spike-head, and the front half of the dead creature moves to the wall above its living counterpart. Arthur sculpts the air with his fingers, and the Spike-head is cemented to the wall, chest first; head, neck and shoulders jutting out into the air above. A tight smile from Arthur as a drain forms along the spine of the creature and a spigot appears in its mouth, water pouring from it to drench its stunned compatriot- he has turned the grotesque into a true gargoyle.

A simple moment's concentration makes the water pooling around the remaining creature's feet turn to ice and fix it in place. Another moment, some muttered words and the creature barks in surprise as the composition of the stone making up its body changes- what was once smooth, cold marble is now unfinished, yellowing limestone. A final gesture from Arthur's hands and the water gushing from the mouth of the first spike-head-turned-gutter is now no longer water, but a particularly strong vinegar that Arthur remembers Eames pouring liberally over his serving of blood pudding and chips in a dingy little tavern in Inverness- the acrid fumes from Eames' plate had brought tears to Arthur's eyes.

Vinegar has an entirely more dramatic effect on limestone.

Arthur steps over the smouldering, melted remains of the final creature and quickly washes his hands free of henna in the baptismal font nearest the altar

(in the water, his reflection is at last apprehensive. The henna-ink mendhi slide from his flesh and briefly become train tracks before dissolving in the water, staining it a sepia colour. Arthur thinks absurdly of squid-ink pasta)

then moves to Eames, pale and still where he lies. Arthur lowers the temperature dramatically around the High Altar and his heart leaps in relief as the life-affirming fog of Eames' regular breathing streams from the forger's lips.

"Eames" he murmurs, trailing one still-damp hand down the older man's cheek. "Eames, I need you to come back to me, now."

Eames' brow furrows. His eyelids flutter as the eyes behind them roil back and forth, tracking movement. Arthur feels the air around them suddenly charge with energy that tugs at his hair and sends frissons juddering up and down his skin. The energy is centred on- and coming from- the man lying in front of him.

"Come on..." Arthur urges. "You can do it. Please."

Arthur's hand, entirely of its own volition, finds one of Eames' and squeezes. There is an answering pressure from the British man's fingers.

_//Arthur//_

the energy thrumming in the air about them

_//Arthur she's not... she won't let...//_

dissipates with a sudden rushing pop, arcing away from the altar and grounding in the marble pillars to either side. The sound of a train shunting over tracks in the distance outside.

Arthur whips around in a fury and addresses the super-structure of the cathedral around him.

"Goddamn you! Let him go! I told you, I don't give a fuck about what you're doing. That's enough!"

Beats of silence in the vast space. 

And then, at last, she is coming. From the corner of his eye, Arthur can see her approach. He turns to face her.

She is, of course, the titanic statue of Christ on his cross. As Arthur watches, the beard recedes back into the jaw, the nose shortens and narrows.  Deep brown eyes wash out to green, and the pained sadness in them is replaced by a sardonic mischief. She pulls her thin-boned wrists free of the nails holding them to the horizontal beam, and takes the crown of thorns from her head. Long brown hair immediately shortens, darkens and curls at the ends. The flail and scourge marks on the torso are absorbed back into the body, and the flesh lightens several shades. Arms and legs lengthen, the wound in the side closes over. The four limbs and the four cross-beams are silhouetted in the light from the stained glass facade for a moment, and her rippling figure resembles some improbable spider.

Arthur slides Eames' prone form off the altar, taking the other man in his arms in a pose that

(somewhat ironically, given current circumstances)

resembles Michelangelo'sPietà.  When he returns his gaze to her, she has kicked her long legs out, freeing the ankles from the single nail that pierces them. The small loincloth about the hips broadens, lengthens, crawls up over her entire body, covering her chest even as flat, scourged pectorals heal, swell and inflate into rounded breasts. The loincloth whips around her, forming a beautiful, turquoise evening gown with a darker, emerald holly-leaf pattern scattered over it. Smiling with lips suddenly plumper and painted blood red, she winds the crown of thorns around her midriff, and it thickens and becomes a belt- the thorns even match the holly pattern on the gown, as though it was an original accessory. 

She kicks out again and the horizontal beam fall down at an angle to the floor. She walks down it as though she were walking down a fashion runway in Kyoto, and when her feet touch the marbled floor they are resplendent in emerald-coloured Antonio Berardi heel-less heels. She walks in them with no effort and no loss of balance.

"Bonjour, Artie." Mal purrs.

Arthur has been looking around the cathedral whilst she has been forming, and has already cataloged seven improvised weapons he could use against her- three of which he would not have to let go of Eames to use. But he can't. He just can't. Even though it isn't Mal, it's still...Mal.

"It's over, now, Mal. It's done. We'll be leaving."

She puts a long crimson nail to square white teeth, tapping as she mock-considers. "Non, je ne le crois pas, Artie. Je suis beaucoup trop de plaisir à jouer avec vous..."

"Goddammit! This is not a game!" Arthur is close to losing his temper again, which he can't allow. He knows she is waiting for an excuse. He hugs Eames tighter to him. "...Just let us go. Let Eames go, at least. Let him wake up, Mal. He's all I want. He's... he's all that matters..."

Something briefly haunts her face; the ghost of what may have once been sympathy haunts her eyes and mouth. Arthur can actually see the moment she chases it away and her eyes harden into frigid jade.

"Prouvez-le, mon cher. Montrer combien il signifie pour vous."

"-He already has, milady. Above and beyond, in fact."

Both Arthur and Mal look at each other, shocked, then look down at the man in Arthur's arms.

Eames smiles at Arthur, squeezes his hand, then pushes out of his arms, standing up. Clothes appear over his flesh as he gains his feet and stretches hugely; desert boots, dark black pants and a jet cashmere windcheater that hugs him in all the places Arthur was a moment ago. 

Eames looks at Arthur, his expression fond. "-You don't owe her anything, pet."

Arthur is, for once, at a loss. Completely flummoxed. "But she... you said she was keeping you under" He stares at Eames, jaw agape.

"-Careful Arthur love, you'll catch flies." Eames smiles as Arthur's mouth slams shut. "-You've been down here a while; you're accepting the Dream Logic a little too readily. Mal's not holding anything over us, because she's dead, remember? 

Mal growls gutturally and moves towards Arthur. Eames moves between them and looks her in the eye, unsmiling. "-No closer please, Mademoiselle Cobb".

Mal retreats several steps.

Mal  _backs off_.

Arthur nods. "Yes, I remember; but her Projection..."

"-Was there with Cobb and Fischer, the Level above Limbo. Think, Arthur."

Arthur looks at Mal, frowning. "Cobb faced you. He... resolved you. He told us afterward, back in the States."  He turns to Eames, who is nodding. "She wouldn't come any more. Cobb let her go. There's no reason, no way she'd ever come ba..." He turns to Mal again. "You... you can't be her! You're not her!"

Mal has regained her poise. "Est-il ainsi? Est-ce exact?" Her eyes flash, as sharp and deadly as the long piece of broken stained glass now jagged and heavy in her hand. "Alors, qui suis-je, si je ne suis pas votre précieux épouse de Cobb dont il a toujours pleure?"

//Yes Arthur, who is she?//

Eames crosses over to Arthur, quickly, takes him by the shoulders. "-Think, love. Put the pieces together. They're all there, floating around inside that beautiful head of yours. Come on, Arthur!"

and

// "Limbo's dread Labyrinth"//

Arthur

//"plucking the silken strands" //

suddenly

//"some improbable spider"//

**Knows.**

"Oh God". Arthur reels with the insight, probably would have tripped over his own feet 

(somewhere very close, a train is running; he feels the vibration through his shoes)

if Eames hadn't been there to steady him.

Arthur turns, and looks at Mal. "You're a puppet, Mal. I see your strings."

Mal hisses, lips pulled back from her teeth in a fury, so much that her entire gum-line is exposed. "Non. non. NON!"

She charges Arthur, no longer the beautiful friend that Arthur cherished, now merely a shrieking, wild eyed harridan. Raising the jagged piece of stained glass high over her head, she moves to bury it in his strange and remote heart.

-And Eames, still smiling broadly, steps in front of Arthur, blocking the downward stroke of the shard, taking it himself. 

Before Arthur's face can even register horror, the shard hits the muscle and flesh over Eames' own heart- and shatters into a million pieces of glinting debris.

Both Arthur and Mal watch the multi-coloured glass dust hang in the air. Eames runs a finger through it, and the colourful dust turns into a swarm of tiny, rainbow-prismed butterflies that wheel through the air for a moment, then ascend into the vault of the cathedral and are gone.

Eames winks at Arthur. "-Ghosts can't hurt you, Arthur. Especially not in dreams. And memories can only hurt you if you let them." 

The forger turns back to Mal. "-Mademoiselle Cobb; I believe this is for you."  He reaches into his breast pocket, extracts a small square of embossed, finely-milled, cobalt-dyed paper and hands it to her.

Mal looks at him, at Arthur, and then turns the paper square over in her blood-coloured nails.

A train ticket.

" J'attends... I... I am... waiting... for a train..."

She looks back up at the Forger and the Point Man. Eames is no longer smiling, but sympathy shines in his eyes.  "-Yes, Mademoiselle Cobb; and I think it's finally coming into the station." He places his hands on Arthur's shoulders "-Stop holding it back, Arthur. Let it come.  Let it  _out_ " and seals his lips over the other man's, kissing him breathless.

Arthur freezes stock-still for a split, second, then kisses Eames back, wholeheartedly. He grips Eames' body, his fingers cataloging the topography of the older man's arms, chest and neck. Something loosens in his head.

The kiss breaks and Arthur and Eames, their hands entwined together, both turn their heads simultaneously towards the floor. The marble squares ripple and warp and the floor of the cathedral is suddenly coarse ballast stone.  Eames and Arthur look in unison at the altar. The discarded beams of the cross trundle over towards them, replicating until there are many dozens, which flick onto the gravel and -joined by dozens of feet of iron railings from the fence around the High Altar- form railroad tracks. The High Altar and the area around it fade into elliptical blackness, then reform in the darkened lozenge shape of a train-tunnel. 

A stentorian horn sounds from inside the tunnel. A blasting rush of hot air races down the tracks and buffets the two men as they step aside.  Mal moves to run, but again Arthur and Eames move their heads to look at her in unison, and the train tracks at her feet surge upwards, form crude hands that grab at her feet with riveted iron fingers. Light from the tunnel pours over her and the train's whistle is now a deafening shriek,  the awful, triumphant keening of a shrike as it swoops towards another bird with murder in its eyes.

The train explodes out of the tunnel and into the cathedral; a gigantic, steam-powered juggernaut, all razor-sharp metal angles and screaming, fevered pistons. It is coloured a blazing, electric cobalt blue and the engine car bearing down on Mal is shaped like a huge and grinning skull. It rears up over her, steam as cold and blue as death pouring from its socket nose and rictus mouth. Mal screams in rage and throws out her arms and, with an answering roar, the cobalt train smashes down upon her.

-  -  -

Arthur and Eames pick their way across the shattered marble. The train is gone, having roared back down the tunnel moments after having made its kill, all of its horns blaring in triumph.

(the two men had wasted no time in erasing the tunnel and dissolving the train tracks on the floor).

They find her quickly enough. Mal is lying by the shattered altar, arms and legs akimbo. Her flesh is shiny pink plastic, her hair coiled strands of dyed brown string, her red mouth is painted directly onto the plastic, and her eyes are two marbles, painted green. She is, quite literally, a broken doll.

Eames nudges Arthur. "-Any moment now." The Point-Man nods.

The Mal-equin suddenly twitches as the beautiful green evening gown writhes and shifts- first violently, then slow and sly, as if something is endeavoring to be stealthy. A tearing sound and the green silk is torn at the sternum. Another, hollow crack and the plastic flesh of the sternum itself cracks in a long fissure down to the first ribs.

Long beats of silence and stillness and then, from the depths of the crack, a translucent, multiple-jointed white leg, no wider than a pencil and about twice as long, emerges from the plastic corpse. It feels around cautiously, and another leg emerges alongside, then another, and another. Eight pale, spindly legs eventually straddle what is left of Mal, and then, with a terrible sucking noise

_**(Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssscccchiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick)** _

a fat, pale body the size and colour of a human skull pulls free. At its apex is a small head, which despite the multiple eyes and venom-dripping fangs, still boast a recognizable face.

Ariadne.

The Architect Spider sees the two men and moves to scuttle away, but Arthur is quicker. He scoops the thing up in his hands, Eames tightening his lips in distaste as Arthur's fingers sink into the bloated white sac of the abdomen up to the quick of his fingernails.

"-Don't let her bite you, love."

"She won't hurt me."

 

Indeed, as the Architect Spider's multiple eyes

(strange to see Ariadne's pretty brown eyes repeated eight times over the tiny face)

take in Arthur's face, her pedipalps stop kneading together and her fangs stop biting at the air.

"...Arthur?"

"Yes, it's me." Cautiously, he lets go of her abdomen, and manages to hold in his revulsion as the Ariadnarachnid crawls up his body, perching its front four legs on either side of his head so it can look him in the face.

"...You came here for Eames."

"That's right. And I found him."

"...Does he know how you feel about him?"

At this, Arthur looks through the cradle of the spider's legs and catches Eames' eye. The Forger crosses over to stand beside him, his smile warm, broad, open- and only for Arthur. Arthur feels his own lips quirk upwards in response. "Yes, I suspect he may understand the gist of it."

Ariadne smiles through her fangs. The red of her lips is a bloody slash in the geisha-mask of her face. 

"...You're leaving now; I can't...I can't come back with you, can I?"

"No. No, I'm afraid that won't be possible."

"...I have flashes of memory, but it's very... nebulous. It flits away when I focus on it. How long ago was it?"

Arthur is quiet.

"...Eames?"

"-A month, Ariadne. You were killed a month ago. We were tracking the Cobol bastards who did it when... when all this happened."

"...Only four weeks? It felt longer." The spider crawls down Arthur's body and waits on the floor by his feet. ""...I'm ready." 

Arthur nods, but cannot bring himself to move. In the end, it is Eames who steps forward, a piece of the altar-stone in his hands. Strangely, when the Englishman raises it high above his head and brings it down, rather than the horrid squelch Arthur had been expecting, there is a crackle like lightning and the smell of Ozone.

The spider and the Dream burst apart at the same time. Arthur feels himself lurching and grabs at Eames with a gasp as-

 

-He jerks upright and awake with the same movement, his pulse a frantic drumbeat inside his ears. Arthur looks about himself. He is in the same place he was when he conducted this desperate scheme some hours

(minutes)  

before.

Arthur is lying on a gently sloping, grassy hill inthe Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.  Lying prone atop a particular grave, the PASIV Device whirring away beside him. Eames lies prone next to Arthur, their heads touching, the hands not intubated with Somnacin-laden piping holding tightly to each other. Arthur can feel the pain of a pulled muscle in his abdomen, probably from when he dragged Eames' comatose body from the car and hauled him all the way here in a last, desperate plan to wake the man up from his month-long sleep.

//Please let him be awake//

"...Eames?"

Even as the thought that Eames will remain comatose grips Arthur's brain tight with sticky, friable fingers, Eames sits up on the grass beside him, yawning hugely as he pulls the PASIV tubing from his arm. He looks over at Arthur, smiling fondly. 

"-Hullo, love. Overslept, did I?"

Arthur closes his eyes for a moment, muttering something that Eames can't catch

("...Oh, thank Christ")

 -and then the startled but delighted Forger suddenly has a double armful of Arthur apparently trying to burrow into his chest.

Eames manages to pull the Arthur-shaped barnacle his favourite Point-Man has apparently transformed into away from his chest for a few moments. "-Arthur! I'm alright, pet! Honestly, I'm alright!"

Arthur laughs to himself at this. "After all the time I've spent waiting for this moment, you'd better be a lot more than just 'alright', Mr. Eames- I fully expect you to make sure I can't walk without a limp for the next week"

Eames is baffled, but amused. "Arthur. Dear heart. I have absolutely no idea what you're getting a _mmmmph_!"

After a few minutes of letting Arthur's mouth explore his own, Eames finally breaks the kiss with a wicked, full-wattage grin. "-Oh".

Eames helps Arthur gather up the PASIV device and the stray IV lines with their soporific cargo. And if, as they tidy up and then walk with their arms around each other and drive back to one of Arthur's numerous Parisian addresses, both men notice that a third IV line extends from the PASIV and disappears down into the loam of the grave on which they had both been resting, both of them are far too polite to mention it.

 

\----- END----

  
FRENCH TRANSLATIONS:

Nique ta mere, salop!...  Fuck your mother, bastard!  
L'Enfer est plus beau que le Ciel... Hell is more beautiful than Heaven  
Chéri... Darling  
Que désirez-vous?.. What would you like?  
Contrefacteur...  male forger  
Costume gentil... Nice suit!  
Vous pouvez poser une question a leur et une seule... You may ask of them one question, and one question alone  
Non, je ne le crois pas, Artie. Je suis beaucoup trop de plaisir à jouer avec vous... No, I don't think so, Artie. I'm having too much fun playing with you.  
Prouvez-le! Montrer combien il signifie pour vous... Prove it! Show me how much he means to you.  
Est-il ainsi? Est-ce exact?.. Is that so?! Is that right?!  
Alors, qui suis-je, si je ne suis pas votre précieux épouse de Cobb dont il a toujours pleure!... Then who am I, if not your precious Cobb's late lamented wife?!  
\---

**Author's Note:**

> Whew! This was a long one! Inspired by a talk I had with a friend comparing Mal Cobb to Freddy Krueger, which got the... train...rolling!
> 
> This fic is dedicated to Colton Haynes. He knows why :D


End file.
